Did you spot Tessa Jowell's little whinge in the Observer a couple of Sundays ago? Poor Tessa was upset because some people think she's a philistine. Following the announcement that lottery funding to the arts would be slashed to make sure the 2012 Olympics are held together by more than just a hope and a prayer, Tessa says "distinguished artists and commentators have queued up to put the boot in" to Labour. Well here's some news Tessa: those of us who care about art and literature in the UK are prepared to go a few rounds yet with Labour. And one fight I for one want to have with the government over research in the arts and humanities. Although much has been written about the robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul mentality of the raid on lottery arts funding, far less in the way of column inches have been spent on the recent cut of £5.3 million to the largest funding body for arts research in the UK, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The cuts were made by the DTI to cover the department's costs involved in the Rover car company collapse and British Energy's nuclear liabilities.

Why does this cut matter so much? First, it is part of a general attack on research for research's sake. The AHRC was not the only Research Council affected by the DTI's clawing back of research money for - ahem - more pressing purposes: they all were. The DTI has slashed a total of £68m from the Research Councils' budgets, leaving the head of the Medical Research Council, Professor Colin Blakemore pondering "how best to minimise the impact of this reduction on the research we fund"). Make no mistake: this attack on research is not just a one-off blip. Research as something to be valued in itself has been losing ground for a long time. Research in science and technology now labours under the double dictate of short-termism and instrumentalism. The explosion of patents in the last 20 years is not about technical innovation. It's about the pressure on research to perform for the market - gone are the days when Alexander Fleming could accidentally discover penicillin lurking in his chaotic laboratory.

Arts and literature research particularly suffers in such a climate. The kind of painstaking, time-consuming investigations at the heart of arts and humanities research is never going to result in valuable patents. There will be no £1bn paybacks from the new AHRC Museum and Galleries Research grants, now deferred for a year because of the DTI funding cuts. These grants would have enabled research into exhibitions and conservation at world-class public institutions such as the British Library and Tate. The pulling of funds from such research (research rightly described by Philip Esler, the AHRC's chief executive, as "a global success story") makes a mockery of David Lammy's speech last week proclaiming the worth of archives. Archival, manuscript and bibliographical research - intricate, absorbing and protracted work - has little to offer arts policies based on "social cohesion" (the phrase loomed large in Lammy's speech) or the "creative economy" (an idea much touted on the DCMS website). Arts research is so much bigger than such buzz policies - ask yourself the question posed to me by an AHRC spokesperson: what would our national life be like "if we had no philosophy, no studies in English or the classics or modern languages, no work on religion, no disciplined knowledge of British history, no research in the visual or performing arts?"

Not everybody accepts that literature is only useful if it can cure society's ills or boost the economy. We need to defend that bigger vision of a society enriched because literature and research simply just are. The lifeblood of the best university literature departments is research. I flicked through AHRC research grants given in recent years to two wonderful departments I studied in and worked for, Liverpool and Warwick - out of that research had come important studies on Chaucer, Dickens, Beckett, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Renaissance books, Aphra Behn, Hardy, Joyce, science fiction and Augustan poetry as well as a new edition of Pope's poetry. A literature department that oozes research from every pore is one that enthralls its students without the need for rubber-stamping teaching proficiency. Seminars at Liverpool led by the Shakespeare scholar, Jonathan Bate, when he was deep in the throes of editing the Arden Titus Andronicus, writing The Genius of Shakespeare and researching "romantic ecology" were what a liberal arts education should be about: research to inform, to captivate and to argue over.

We shouldn't let such research be quietly bled of cash without some real dust-ups with the philistines responsible.